The Gordian Knot of "WP:NOR"
=Introduction: The Oulfberhot Swords= I plan on trying to place my observation concerning “Ulfberht” swords into the public consciousness, but a lifetime of experience in confronting Authority leaves me with little hope of this effort being easy; I anticipate that it may be exponentially more difficult than it was to make the observation itself! Let’s examine just what I am looking to accomplish in detail, and what concerns me about how others will react. First, I would like to have the Wikipedia community rename the page to “Oulfberhot” rather than the present “Ulfberht”, and reasonably, to have a redirect pointer from “Ulfberht” to “Oulfberhot”, should someone continue to search for, or link to, the former term rather than the latter. Simple, right? Just a few keystrokes would make this happen; it would be no more difficult than the observation being made. But perhaps it’s not actually that simple, in that such a change would seem to be a violation of one of the more central values of the Wikipedia community: “No Original Research”. The name itself seems kind of odd, and while it expresses the intent of the rule in a way that makes that intent fairly explicit, the values that are implicit in why any community at all would be better off to observe it are problematic in themselves. Let’s go one level deeper into this little dragon-filled dungeon of mine, shall we? =Wikipedia Has Outgrown NOR= What is meant by “NOR” is that the community is dedicated to the proposition that individual editors are entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts. While that would seem, superficially, to be perfectly reasonable, it ignores the blatant difference between “objective” facts, facts upon which we are socially compelled by entirely artificial consequences to agree, and facts which are held in the possession of a specific individual, but have not yet been granted the status of being “objective”; facts which can have consequences whether they are granted as true by others or not. The more that others deny the objectivity, the worse the consequences will eventually be. It is the prejudicial nature of the process of granting a fact “objective” status, based on various opinions of Legitimacy, which creates my misgivings about the value of “NOR” as a standard of the community. When Wikipedia was first trying to establish itself as a legitimate collection of encyclopedic knowledge (remember encyclopedias?), the NOR guideline was useful to lay the groundwork of including socially relevant and legitimate information, so that the real work of editors could be preserved against the efforts of editors exemplified by “Randy in Boise”. Wikipedia has long since outgrown the need for this protection, however, and now the costs of NOR significantly outweigh the remaining benefits: Wikipedia suffers for the lack of expert opinions (which opinions inherently tread on the edges of Original Research), suffers the abuse of NOR by the same “Randy in Boise” it was meant to exclude, and the scarcity of material left to tackle which is thoroughly conventional and uncontroversial. Wikipedia can no longer function as just an imitator of previously existing knowledge; it has, sooner or later, to admit its newer role as an arbiter of what knowledge is to be taken as legitimate. If we take the Prigogenic Levels of Development as a template, then Wikipedia has passed through the phases of Autopoesis and Phylogeny, imitating the offline encyclopedias that came before it (including the necessary yearly expansions, which Wikipedia instead does constantly and better), and moved toward the Ontogeny phase, in which it is now taking on a more original and self-directed growth and development. =Occam’s Razor and Modern Systems of Knowledge= Much the same as NOR limits the growth of Wikipedia, Occam’s Razor is a limit to our larger body of knowledge as a society. While positing theory as truth will not get very far in most cases, there is the possibility of asking questions, which ought to be better indulged, as there are no longer the physical and financial limitations inherent to publishing information that there once were. It no longer takes a significant investment of money, dead trees, and gallons of ink to ask a question, or even make the wildest speculation; all it takes is labor, and only in formulating the material and preparing its presentation. The hardware and software, requiring decades of labor, and now making use of economies of scale, all but pay for themselves. Maintaining and improving these systems is real work, but without a huge body of laborers, each in a relative cottage industry of creating content, these systems will never be seen as anything but toys for social niceties and amusement at their best, and at their worst will be seen as simply the means to exploit, harass, and misinform as many people as possible. =The Only Real Cost of a Wiki is Content= There are only two real costs to be paid by a Wiki: those who produce the content, and the administrators who contribute little or nothing to acquiring an audience and thereby acquiring advertising revenue. Every real tool made and retained (unlike maps!) adds to the value of a Wiki by allowing new forms of content to be included. All the “supervisory” functions are largely dollars wasted on social welfare or charity by another name. On the other hand, documentation of all the features of a Wiki that an editor or bureaucrat should know is woefully lacking. Barring an Act of God, every effort made should have content and editing as its central themes. Good system moderators make the community stronger by supporting quality efforts; unjust moderators create more conflict than would be had without any moderators at all. Category:WP:NOR